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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

I think the oil it produced would be worth about £0.25 (GBP) (400ml assuming the price is the same as Brent crude and ignoring the cost of the input plastic or the machine itself etc). But the power to run it (3kWh) would cost about £1 (1GBP) at current rates at least here in the UK.

I might be wrong, I'm not sure whether the oil produced is equivalent to Brent crude (I picked it at random) or more valuable or less...

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Still might make sense when solar/wind is at peak to make it as a longer time storage? While still getting rid of plastic waste.

But of what use is that mystery oil? All current petroluem products are highly quality controlled, both for lubrication and use in engines. You didn't get rid of the plastic, you converted it into a liquid which you must now dispose of safely. The only upside I see is that the plastic won't litter and turn into micro plastics in the ocean, but since it's already collected, then burn in a central plant ASAP IMHO.

You could probably use it in a diesel engine. People filter used frying oil from restaurants and run their diesels on that.

Yes, you absolutely can, especially in an old diesel engine, they can run on all kinds of oil. But the engine might not fare well, depending on the properties of the oil, and the exhaust might contain "interesting" stuff like dioxins, depending on what was in the mystery plastic to begin with.

I would say if this could be done by some utility company, that company could have diesel engines to generate power from that oil which could have filters and all that stuff.

I assume it still could be profitable because people who want to get rid of plastic waste would still have to pay. Getting excess power from grid is also something one would get paid for. Then turning on generators when grid needs power to get paid when there is a power shortage.

But as I write this out I imagine that it would require massive amounts of investments for setting up such operation and getting all kind of permits or environmental studies and god knows what. Let alone getting deals with electric companies - so I think that would be something that some electric company would have to set up. They would most likely have most know-how for such setup.

If you’re going to burn it for electricity in a stationary location, skip the middle man and burn the waste itself.

Meanwhile, the power company in this city burns plastic (and all kinds of waste) in their co-generation plant and gets electricity and residential heating.

Also old diesel engines are bad for air quality and efficiency

There's an argument to be made here for refurbing the best of the container ship engines after the ship hulls reach end of life.

The higher end engines are three storey high multistaged diesel engines with filters, scrubbers and some of the highest bunker oil -> power efficiencies on the planet.

They're ideal for generating baseload power and worth the rejuvenation effort.

Most (80% was the number I saw) large bunker-oil engines with scrubbers installed simply dump the removed sulphides into the sea as wastewater instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Not to mention the colossal amounts of carbon-related pollutants.

Solvable problems via a retrofit to be sure, but overall I'd rather than the HFO's are simply not burned at all.

Last I checked oil was the primary ingredient in making plastic. This could be a way to recycle plastic that is not recyclable by normal means.

Much of the feedstock for plastic is from natural gas, not from oil. Fracked gas in particular has a lot of ethane, which is converted to ethylene and then to polyethylene. The rise of fracked gas in the US caused PE production to move here.

plastic is a byproduct of the petroleum production process.

> But of what use is that mystery oil?

You can probably power the next few runs of the machine with it.

Also makes sense in Japan (and Korea, and maybe other places I don't know about), where the populace is very mindful not just of making sure garbage ends up in a can, but as well separating it based on the type of garbage.

Contrast with the US, where people decide to save a few bucks a month by dumping their garbage bags along the side of the road, or tossing garbage out the window of their car.

The key may be economically transporting the waste plastic as feedstock. Guess it may be much more expensive. Even assuming 5 cents/ kwh of solar this makes economic sense as storage system otherwise. I presume in the future we have autonomous robots that clean the cities of plastic and feed it to such machines which run on surplus renewable energy

You still have people paying for their waste disposal, so I would assume transport cost should be covered by that.

More worth than crude. Crude also needs processing. The output from this bench processor is probably somewhere around the red fraction here:

https://petroleumservicecompany.com/blog/oil-barrel-42-gallo...

Thanks!

When running on spare hydro, wind or solar power which cannot be accumulated or returned to grid, it can have some uses.

I'm not sure the economics works on something like that. Once you buy all the equipment, employees, and commercial buildings, it simply isn't going to be profitable to only run your factory 10% of the time (How often does solar power go wasted? Not actually sure).

Maybe it would work if this was only one step in a larger processes. When energy is free, use it to make a ton of this crude oil and then process the crude with less energy intensive methods when electricity is expensive.

If this is a thermal process, then intermittent cheap energy can be stored in thermal masses (firebrick, for example) much more cheaply than in batteries, and the heat used later. That way that later stage can be kept operating more continuously.

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